The much awaited and promoted Adobe Photoshop CS5 is now available for purchase and for trial download. The first feature I was anxious to try out is the “tourist remover” tool, which allows you to replace a selected area or object with a “content aware” fill pattern which is automatically created from other similar areas of the image.

Like all gee-whiz tools this one sounds too good to be true so I had to try it out first thing. My first attempt was a little too much for the tool. I wasn’t able to remove an out of focus duck that partially obscured my subject goose. But when I tried it on an image where the duck and the goose didn’t overlap it did indeed seem nearly miraculous as it quickly and painlessly removed the duck from my image. The original image (opened directly from the Raw file) looked like:

It took a little while to find the right command to do the job (surprisingly there was no menu item called “tourist remover”:-)), but it turned out to be a combination of two commands. First, you select the object or area to remove (I used the Lasso tool for a quick selection around the duck) and then simply choose “Edit->Fill” and leave the default choice of “Content Aware” alone. It’s as simple as that. In the case of the duck it worked nearly perfectly. You can see the results below:

It couldn’t be any quicker or easier. If you’re considering upgrading to CS5 it is definitely worth at least downloading the trial and giving it a whirl. Camera Raw has some nifty new features including improved noise reduction I’ll be writing about in future posts, for example. If you’re ready to take the plunge you can pre-order Photoshop CS5 now from Amazon for $190 for the Windows Version (both 32-bit and 64-bit) or $190 for the MacOS version. If you download the trial from Adobe in the meantime you’ll have the license & CD in plenty of time to activate your copy.